great a pleasure it is, when the sky is clear, to go out at night and gaze at them! What multitudes of stars there are! How calm and still they seem! How beautifully they shine and sparkle! We never tire of looking at them. In olden times, people had very strange ideas about the stars. They thought some of them were wild animals. There is one set of stars which we see in the form of a plow, that people called the "Great Bear." Then, there are other stars which they called after the names of great men who had died. One very beautiful set of stars, which we can see every night in the winter time, they used to call Orion, after a famous hunter of that name. Men have now large telescopes, through which they look at the stars, and they have found out a great many interesting things about them, of which people in former times knew nothing at all. Now, we know that the stars are all worlds; some of them larger than our own. When we look at the stars with our naked eyes, they all appear to be white, like the moon. But if we see them through one of the great telescopes, which are used by men who study the stars, we shall find that they are of many different colors. Some are red, some are yellow, some are green, some are blue, and some are purple. Instead of being all of one color, we shall see as many colors among them as there are among the flowers of a garden. When we look up at the sky on a clear, bright night and see the stars there, the thing that we think about first is the number of them. They seem to be too many to count; but it is not so. They have been counted. It looks as if there were no end to their number, and yet there are only a few thousand. that can be seen with the naked eye. If, however, we take a telescope, we shall discover a great many more; and the more powerful the telescope we look through is, the greater is the number of stars that we shall see. due fare The How many dollars are from New York to Albany is me? Yes! poor indeed! A little girl selling papers in the streets of a large and crowded city. She has no father or mother. Her name is Kitty, and she and her brother Charley live with an aunt. Every night these two children must sell eight dozen papers, and carry the money home to their aunt, who is very poor, and who takes care of them. It is the evening of a bleak wintry day. The clocks of the churches have just struck six. A biting wind is blowing, and our poor bare-footed girl is running from one side of the street to the other. As she runs, she calls out "Telegram-fourth edition." Crowds are passing―rushing home from the day's work; but no one seems to want a paper. Wagons, carts, and carriages are moving along the street, |